About

This website highlights passive solar design, its practicality, beauty and creativity within its design and building principles. The many different possibilities and configurations associated with passive solar design with be explored and highlighted.

Passive solar design and building is quite a green building concept (arguably the most green) because it is based on the principles of harnessing the free energy* of the sun. With a little planning and design, this type of building can be reasonably affordable and very efficient.

Modified earthship-style passive solar residence

GreenPassiveSolar.com hopes to be a resource where people can share ideas, be inspired, informed, become more efficient and cut down on energy bills.

GreenPassiveSolar.com will look at all sorts of different types of building styles, everything from residential to commercial, from traditional buildings to nontraditional building styles like earthships, to retrofits and everything in between.

*The sun gives free energy! If the sun stops giving its energy, life on earth will have at the most, only have a couple of weeks to live. Why not utilize this energy?

Residence made with beetlekill wood and is a passive and active solar grid-tie dwelling

If a passive solar house is designed effectively, can improve your quality of life (as increased sunlight has been known to cut down on depression) cut down on bills spent on other energy sources (perhaps you could take a vacation) and help to provide cleaner air (since there’s no need to burn wood or spend lots of money on natural gas).

This is not a ‘how-to’ guide or instructive site, rather, it highlights the broad range of creativity and possibilities within passive solar design.

National Renewable Energy Lab courtesy of DOE-NREL

While passive solar design can potentially harness a very efficient and reliable energy source, there are currently no federal, state or local building incentives to build in this way.

There has been a large and successful push to get Americans to be more efficient, it seems to involve the purchase of major appliances, – which is nice, however, passive solar building has been left out. With our current state of climate change and a realization of dwindling resources, there has been a push toward everything that can be labeled as “green”. While this is generally a very good thing, in the rush to be green, many confusing and conflicting terms for various housing and building elements has come about. This website hope to clarify some of this and will focus on terms having to do with passive solar design, while explaining the beneficial aspects, while showing a glimpse into the vast array of different types of passive solar design integration.

In the meantime, many, many people have and are making beautiful, smart and efficient passive solar buildings and homes. I’ll try to find them and write about them here. This website hopes to bring more attention to the concept of passive solar building.

This is an independent project, managed by A Girl with a Camera, LLC, and is not affiliated with any governmental entity such as the DOE or NREL.